34 pages • 1 hour read
Empire Of Illusion: The End Of Literacy And The Triumph Of Spectacle
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Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Illusion of Love”
At the Adult Video News expo in Las Vegas, a booth run by the Pink Cross, a Christian outreach organization for women who work in porn, is surrounded by booths promoting porn releases. Many of these booths feature professional escorts and famous porn stars with whom passersby can take pictures.
A 29-year-old man working at the Pink Cross booth admits that he was once addicted to porn; he reports that his addiction affected his capacity to be intimate. Patrice Roldan, a woman working at the Pink Cross table, explains that she began working in porn after surviving a physically abusive childhood. Roldan has gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases contracted while working in porn. Over time, Roldan explains, the work has become more violent and physically demanding. Hedges identifies symptoms of post-traumatic stress in Roldan while interviewing her.
Since the 1970s, porn has gone to greater lengths to depict novelty, increasingly employing violence, abuse, and physical domination of women. Many men who work in porn verbally abuse women co-stars. Many women who work in porn suffer severe emotional and physical injury and depend on drugs or alcohol to cope with the work.
Las Vegas, the location of the expo, is an especially fitting setting for a porn convention. Las Vegas is a city built on spectacle and illusion, and it openly commodifies human beings. Hedges cites writer Neil Postman as proclaiming that Las Vegas is “a metaphor for our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl” (65). One can even experience the veneer of many world cultures without having to travel to foreign lands.
Many porn films that appear at the Las Vegas expo base their plots around familiar television shows. A man named Jeff Thrill writes shows based on the sitcoms The Brady Bunch, Happy Days, and Gilligan’s Island. One of his films features the characters of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Condoleezza Rice. The most popular pornographic films push the limits of the actresses who star in them. In one film, a 21-year-old actress named Ariana Jollee has sex with 65 men. In another film, Jollee submits to having her head dunked in a toilet. Jollee’s experience demonstrates that porn is a mirror for the cruelty of society. In both torture and porn, humans are turned into objects. Porn films are also overtly racist, reducing men and women to crude stereotypes.
A woman named Sharon Mitchell, who used to work in porn, now works to test actors and actresses for sexually transmitted diseases. She states that working in porn is much higher risk than when she was in the industry. Actors are pressured into unsafe practices, such as not wearing condoms. Mitchell confirms that they are seen less as real people than as commodities.
The changes in the porn industry that are characterized by higher-risk practices can be linked to the internet. The internet has greatly changed the porn industry by making porn widely available. Around 12% of all websites are pornographic. The websites that depict cruelty and abuse to women are the most popular; one website called Slut Bus lures women into a vehicle, films them having sex, and then kicks them back out to the road, waving cash at them as the vehicle drives away.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Though pornography ostensibly depicts sex, Hedges claims that pornography is actually a “bizarre, bleached, pantomime of sex” (57). Production techniques dehumanize those involved by perfecting their skin and removing physical flaws; actors rarely display any emotions, so their lack of expressiveness enhances their doll-like qualities. In this way, porn is an extremely narrow portrayal of sex, during which the consumer will feel no warmth, love, or intimacy for another person.
The porn convention takes place in Las Vegas, a city which “lends itself to the celebration of porn” (63). Just as pornography commodifies the human body, so too does Las Vegas celebrate the total commodification of all pleasurable experiences. Both Las Vegas and pornography employ spectacle and illusion to keep consumers emptily engaged. In the past, New York was a symbol for “melting pot America” (65), and today, Las Vegas is a symbol for America’s appetites. Just as the sex depicted in porn is plastic and fake, so too are the superficial facades of Las Vegas hotels like the Luxor.
Hedges draws parallels between porn, cruelty, and torture. Most U.S. citizens remain passive in the wake of news regarding the death of civilians in Gaza, Iraq, or Afghanistan as well as the plight of the homeless and the imprisoned. The cruelty depicted in porn is a natural outgrowth of this indifference that Americans feel towards one another and citizens around the world. Torture and porn are similar as well in that each turns the human body into an object to be used or abused without regard for another’s needs or feelings. Hedges compares viewers of porn to torturers, both of whom are aroused by power; porn viewers derive pleasure from the vicarious acts of debasement that they watch, while torturers benefit from the position of authority they hold over their victims.
This abusive attitude is evident in the way that the website Slut Bus characterizes its practices. The site articulates its own mission with misogynistic epithets; according to Hedges, the practice of “discarding” (80) women in this way is common in internet porn content. Meanwhile, the women in porn who are repeatedly treated this way suffer real, dire health consequences. Many are addicted to alcohol and drugs such as crystal meth and heroin. Such an environment leads one former porn actress to declare that “you have no soul in the porn industry” (82).
In these ways, pornography represents another illusion for Hedges. Whereas the image replaced the written word in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2, the synthetic illusions of pornography have replaced the human realities of love.
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